


Even if I could

by hp-rbiim (rbiim)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 8th year, Ficlet, Light Angst, M/M, Onesided, Pining, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 08:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19147384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rbiim/pseuds/hp-rbiim
Summary: Trust Draco Malfoy to fuck up a good thing





	Even if I could

**Author's Note:**

> I was given this tumblr ask prompt:  
> Would you mind doing something along the lines of one of them realizing that he's in love with the other while sitting by the window, watching the rain? ❤

“You just had to go on and cock everything up, didn’t you?” Draco said to himself. “You just couldn’t keep your bloody mouth shut, could you?” He continued, voice rising higher. “You just HAD to go call Potter out like an imbecile, and now look at you.” The reflection on the window sneered back at him; he looked uglier than ever, and it only served to worsen Draco’s mood.

Potter had finally opened up to him about his troubles about the Weaslette, and Draco gave him a scathing review for it. Draco had panicked. Their relationship had finally taken a turn for the better after the war, so much so that you could have nearly called it a blossoming friendship. ‘Nearly” being operative word. He’d bollocks’d it. Badly.

“Cat’s shite. Morgana’s tits. Salazar’s jumping snake pole.” Draco slammed his forehead against the cold glass of his eighth year dorm room window. It’d be great if he actually managed to smash it and just fell right off the stupid tower. It was raining out: sky gloomy and clouds electric. Fitting mood. Events had transpired and everything was as well as it could be in this god awful weather.

Draco wondered whether an apology could do anything for their already testy truce. It was likely Potter would find him a waste of breath. Draco wouldn’t blame him. There was no benefit to holding a friendship with an ex-death eater, it had only been through the goodness of Potter’s heart that they even managed to hold more than one measly but tolerable conversation.

The storm brewing outside Hogwarts grounds found time to plunge the rest of the night into a foggy mist. Water drizzled like a waterfall on the window pane and Draco found himself thinking back to the first time he had bonded with Potter much earlier this year. The weather had been similarly foul, not as bad as it was now, but much more humid — which was enough to fuel his self directed hate post-war to go on a fly out on the Quidditch field.

It was almost suicidal, he would admit. Not that he wanted to die, he just wanted to hurt. He chased the feeling, dodging lightning strikes and whirling in the relentless downpour that buried the sounds of screams in his head. He drove through the clouds, flying like an absolute madman… that is, until Potter showed up on his firebolt, and for some odd reason, joined him on his madness.

In a loss for breath, Draco slapped himself out of his reverie. Ugh. Thinking about Potter wasn’t going to get him anywhere, it just prolonged his misery. Draco longed for the sunny days, and even then, Potter featured frequently in his memories.

There was a word for it, he recalled. The word for his blood curdling obsession with Potter. Not that he would ever say it. Not that anything could ever begin to describe the weight of his feelings. The way that butterflies would crop up in his gut whenever Potter smiled. The way that he began to depend on Potter’s happiness for his own. The way that they jived together through the skies! Or even their undying rivalry, their sarcastic banter, their woefully unreturnable life-debts.

It was pathetic. There were too many moments with Potter that he understood had a feeling attached. Even the moments when one of them didn’t want to talk, but the other understood anyway. Felt in their bones that nothing could quite be said for things that had passed in the wake of the war. That they just could be in the presence of the other, with regard to everything, simply nod and laugh at all their miseries.

Maybe it was just an inevitable empathy for survivors, Draco reasoned. Maybe their easiness with each other just stemmed from enough hardship. Potter probably had hundreds of others that he could talk to, converse with, sit in silence with. There were more than enough that had suffered just the same. Yes, Draco wasn’t special. Not in the way he wished he was to Potter. The way that Potter was to him. The way that Potter’s very existence wrenched his every attention, his every thought, every emotion.

“Fuuuuuuuck.” Draco had to get over him, it was for the best. They were never meant to get along in the first place. That much was obvious.

Yet, he found himself unable to stop caring. Potter was… Draco lacked a better word for it, but he was foundational. Foundational in the sense that nobody else drove him to do things, to act, to consider, to reflect. Potter was the basis of his world, and had the unfortunate circumstances of the war had never happened, Draco found that he probably still would have chased after Potter.

Pansy mentioned a word to him once, but Draco preferred to blot that one out of his mind. Her word was meant to be gentle. His thoughts about Potter were anything but. Her word was supposed to describe the way his mother and father felt about each other. Her word described the way that people held each other’s hand on the way to Hogsmeade. Draco couldn’t imagine that ever happening with him and Potter. It was a different word, and a different world to boot.

That’s the Weaslette’s world, Chang’s world. Even possibly Lovegood if she wasn’t so obsessed with the obscure, invisible critters hovering over mistletoes she could be using for kissing.

Essentially, it was an impossibility, which just happened to be the word Draco decided to settle on. Potter was impossible and Draco was an imbecile for ruining the scraps he should be happy he got.

“I hope you’re happy, Potter.” said Draco, who could only laugh at his own miserable reflection in the window pane. It sounded so insincere, coming from him. “I really do.”

As it was, because even if Draco could never be happy (when was he ever?), at the very least, he could live vicariously through The Boy Who Lived and be done with it. Arse up, Draco. He mutinously thought to himself. You’ve been fucked.

Draco fervently wished he could apologise, but of course… he won’t. Potter was the center of his world, and there was nothing he could do about it (even when there was).

 

_“I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise_

 

\- end -

**Author's Note:**

> I had a wonderful time writing angsty Draco! It is considered complete, but I've also been asked to continue this, so I maybe I will, maybe I won't. I love angst so there's a good chance (laugh)


End file.
